Razor Sharp

The British Class 40 Route du Rhum winner talks to editor James Boyd about his race and his plans

It is good news for British solo sailing that there are a number of people following in the footsteps of Ellen MacArthur and Mike Golding. Competing in the Route du Rhum's Class 40 over these last weeks have been the three most promising contenders but of these Phil Sharp is now head and shoulders above the others, following his Route du Rhum win and before that an outstanding track record in the Mini class. If there is anyone among our new generation of solo sailors who has consistently proved himself worthy of future sponsorship, it is this 25 year old from Jersey.

Two aspects of Sharp's Route du Rhum are not immediately apparent. Firstly there will be the sour grapes brigade who will maintain he won because he took a flier. The fact is Sharp was leading before he was able to enjoy the benefits of his extreme northerly route. The second is that while there were a number of custom-built Class 40s taking part, he was racing an unmodified Pogo 40, the class' original production boat.

Launched in June last year his Pogo was the third to be build by Structures to a design by Finot-Conq, who it should be remembered have been responsible for the last four Vendee Globe winning Open 60s (Gildas Morvan, Sharp's main rival in the Route du Rhum, also sailed a Pogo). For the Route du Rhum Sharp chartered his boat for 40,000 Euros from a French owner who had previously used her as one of the support ships for two French transatlantic races, including last year's Mini Transat in which Sharp had finished fourth. Including this charter fee Sharp reckons his all-up budget for the Route du Rhum was £45-50,000.

"The boat had not been raced before at all," says Sharp. "So I had to get a lot of racing equipment, the security gear, etc. And the jib was really knackered. The fractional spinnaker blew out the first time I put it up, so I had to invest in two new sails. Fortunately I managed to find a sponsor for that. The main had been across the Atlantic four times, but the sailmaker did a good job getting it back into good shape."

Sharp picked up his Class 40 in July and was present in Cowes for Skandia Cowes Week where he was readying himself to compete in the RORC's Seven Stars Round Britain and Ireland Race, an event he was using as a warm-up. Read more about Sharp's preparations here.



The race

The start to Sharp's Route du Rhum was a slow one. The first night he was second last but had pulled up to 16th by the first morning and by lunchtime that same day, 24 hours into the race, he was up to sixth place, although at the time he was third Brit behind Ian Munslow and Nick Bubb. As the boats headed northwest ready to get the shift that would allow them to gybe southwest, Nick Bubb was furthest north with the race leaders Gildas Morvan and Dominique Vittet to the south with Sharp in between. Come the third morning after the boats had gybed Sharp had moved up to the third place and was the northernmost boat (the boats heading southwest at the time) following a similar track to Morvan. It was over the course of this day that he began to make his break.

"We had a long term strategy saying that there might be a front coming through so we kept far north," recalls Sharp. "In the run down to the Azores we were the most northern boat. Then that opportunity became more attractive as it went on and we realised we could gain 100 miles over Morvan by going due west and it paid off really well."

As the boats approached the Azores so a relatively static warm front was developing to their west. Down its western side was a band of strong, favourable northeasterlies and with the front orientated on a southwest-northeast axis, boats to the north would be able to cross it well before those to the south. However the price of this option was sailing many more miles.

Charging west, with Morvan just to his south and Vittet way to the south, some 300 miles away. Sharp took the lead on the morning of the 7th day at sea just before passing through the front.

One wonders why none of the other Class 40s took this option. "I am amazed as well," says Sharp after we put this to him. "I just kept looking at the tables and my weather router kept saying 'go west, go west' and I was looking at the latitudes and longitudes and I was far north and far west of everyone else, so I was just thinking 'I hope you know what you’re doing'." Perhaps Morvan and Vittet were not so keen to go out on a limb, breaking away so far from the great circle. In the Figaro class, which they herald from, fliers tend to be frowned upon, sailors prefering to play the odds and stick with the pack, although even in this year's Solitaire Afflelou le Figaro was won by Nicolas Troussel after he'd taken a flier on the second leg.



Performing the weather routing for Sharp during the Route du Rhum was Jure Jerman, head of the Slovenian Met Office, who he had hooked up with through the Slovenian Mini sailors Andraz Mihelin and Kristian Hajnsek of Team Adria Mobil. Sharp describes how this relationship worked out on the ocean: "On a day to day basis, you get the routing for the day, but it is always very different out there on the water. For instance it is always much more shifty, so you end up always tacking or gybing on the shifts, which your router wouldn't have information about. They don’t say “you’ll have to gybe on this shift at 12.05”. So you are definitely improvising on a general routing strategy. Jure's general routing strategy was A1 and then it was just down to me to keep the boat moving according to that strategy on a day to day basis. Sometimes it was not what he predicted. Once he said you’ll have a nice easy night you are going to get lots of sleep and then I had the thunderstorm! But generally 99% of the time it was spot on. It was definitely a big key to the success."

This thunderstorm very nearly cost Sharp the race as it resulted in him losing his genniker, a vital sail in the downwind conditions to the finish. He recounts how he destroyed it: "I had two reefs in the main and genniker sailing into this thunderstorm thinking I might have 30-35 knots which is why I put some reefs in. The genniker is a very strong sail but I found myself going downwind, death rolling in 40-45 knots of wind and then a 50 knot squall came through and that was it: The boat wiped out and just felt like a dinghy that didn’t have any keel. The masthead was in the water. In retrospect I should have dumped the genniker halyard and left everything in the water and then recovered it afterwards. But it is difficult to think clearly in those situations, so I left it up too long and it flogged to death. So I was pretty cross with myself for that."

Another hair raising moment came when his autopilot packed up just to the north of the Azores. At the time he had the spinnaker up in 25 knots - this in itself would not normally be a problem, as the kite he would typically hold until 29-30 knots."When you haven’t got steerage and you need to get it down it is a bit of an issue." Sharp dived below to get his spare tiller-mounted pilot but having not tried this before in anger it performed little better than if he'd lashed the tiller. "I managed to use it just to keep the tiller straight and I was running forwards and socking the spinnaker as much as I could and then caning it back to the tiller before the boat crash gybed and doing the same thing again and again. About 30 minutes later I had the kite down."

With the spinnaker recovered, he turned his attention to the pilot problem. It turned out that the stern locker housing the drive unit had filled up with water and was causing a short circuit, draining the batteries by 10 amps. "Fortunately nothing was broke, so I just replaced the terminals and bailed all the water out and it worked and we were off again. It was amazing." Sharp ackowledges that if he hadn't been able to fix his pilot then he would have almost certainly had to retire from the race.





Sharp says the most physically demanding episode was when his spinnaker wrapped itself around the forestay, causing him to have to shimmy up the mast to unwrap it manually. "I literally went below for a minute, came up again and it was tightly wrapped. I couldn’t believe it . The previous night I’d slept for hours with the spinnaker up without any problem at all. So it is about just setting the boat up correctly and making sure it doesn’t go slightly too low because then you lose pressure in the sail. So it is horrible [going aloft]. It is pretty tiring. There was only about 15 knots of wind and I managed to unwrap it physically, but I had to climb down on my ascenders, because my descender had fallen over the side. Descending with ascenders is not optimal..."

Other breakages included the headsail furling system. The top swivel broke earlier in the race requiring Sharp again to go aloft to retrieve the halyard. After this he was unable to use the furling system and had to hoist and drop the sail on to the deck traditionally. Later in the race the swivel at the bottom of the furling unit also broke. "So it broke both ends, so it definitely wasn’t designed for the halyard tension the Class 40s need."

Then there were some balance issues with his Pogo's twin rudders. "I could be bombing downwind with the rudder feeling really neutral and suddenly you’d get a huge amount of lee helm and then you’d properly have to throw your whole weight into the tiller to stop the boat crash gybing. What was strange was that I had weather helm on one tack and lee helm on the other." This was a similar problem to what Brian Thompson was experiencing on his Open 60 Artemis and has also affected a number of the new Figaro boats.

After passing the front Sharp was in good shape. Vittet was rapidly finding his southerly option wasn't paying and Morvan was losing ground in lighter conditions, still to the east of the front. As a result Sharp was able to pull out a lead of around 100 miles ahead of Morvan, Vittet dropping out of the picture. But the race was far from done and dusted.

Sharp takes up his account: "We had to go through a light patch in order to get to the west of the trades and he [Morvan] had a lot more wind than predicted and he closed the gap from over 100 miles to 70 miles. Then it became quite dodgy, because it was quite difficult to be assured I was going to keep the gap as a lot of the models break down when you get this light unstable weather."

The light patch was a transition zone between the weather systems to the north and the trade winds to the south. "When we crossed that transition zone, we were pretty confident of getting some good trade winds and Morvan had stayed east, so then our tactics were to go over and cover him because we knew if we were in the same system, we could keep boat speed and could cover him to the finish - or we could go west." The westerly option was a faster point of sail and the routing indicated they would make gains so this latter choice was taken enabling Sharp to once again extend to more than 100 miles.

This tactic did mean that he approached the finish line almost from due north. "I had to head up to round Antigua!" recounts Sharp. "So I had north Atlantic weather until four days before the finish - it was freezing - and then suddenly it warmed up and the sea went from green to blue and then it became actually remotely enjoyable to be sailing."



Technique

When we spoke to Sharp on Friday morning (local time) he was clearly still pumped up from the adrenalin of having won the Route du Rhum, the pinnacle of his sailing career to date. "I woke up and thought ‘Oh God, I’ve overslept again, I must have lost so many miles’. And then I realised it was all done and dusted - I’d won the Route du Rhum, it was a nice feeling."

With a win in the Route du Rhum, a fourth place in last year's Mini Transat and top 10 places in a majority of the races he sailed while in the Mini class, Sharp clearly has an edge of some description. He is well known for pushing his boats extremely hard. Sharp says he is motivated by the competition: "It is guys pushing their boats hard around me. It was good to keep up with Morvan and Vittet. They were pushing hard to begin with but it wasn’t ridiculous, but I could keep up with them while getting some sleep for the first few days. Then I was mentally alert and really on it for going through the front. My weather router said you have to be alert for this because you can potentially gain a lot of miles, so I managed to get a lot of sleep before there. So my overall strategy was really good."

Compared to the Mini Transat the Route du Rhum has been a much more enjoyable experience, Sharp says, simply because there has been human contact, albeit over the phone, but also because having weather information makes the racing much more interesting strategically.. "You strategy changes from day to day, you have contact with land and you learn much more about the weather patterns. You can take advantage of the situation much more."

While he was being routed on this occasion, in comparison in last year's Route du Rhum Sharp says he didn't get any weather information because his radio got wet on the first day. The router not only provided a strategic contribution but his forecast allowed Sharp to plan. For example if there was a tough time ahead, such as going through the front, then he would be able to sleep before this, preparing himself both mentally and physically.

Compared to the Mini Transat he also got a lot more sleep. On once occasion during the first leg of the Mini Transat he had three days without any sleep. "That was just stupid," acknowledges Sharp in retrospect, "because you start losing the plot completely, and not even knowing which way you should be going and then seeing things, you start tripping out. I didn’t have any hallucinations on this trip which was a first. In the Mini Transat, my jib would turn into a person, or a winch would turn into a head and start speaking to me. It was pretty scary. The last day of the first leg of the Mini I was caning it downwind and 70 miles to the finish and I was visualising pontoons around me and all the Minis tied up, thinking I was at the finish but I still had 70 miles to do."

He continues: "When I get fairly tired, people start speaking to me and I know I need to get some sleep when I start replying to them! I don’t get scared as long as they tell me something I already know, then I know that is my mind rather than an outside influence."

During the Route du Rhum Sharp admits he was tired enough that people were talking to him and he did speak back. "’ve become quite experienced now. It comes from being lonely at night."

Sharp says he hasn't had any sleep management training, but discovered a lot about this during the race. "I just sleep when I’m tired because that’s when your body needs to sleep. I started out just sleeping at night but one time I slept during the day and I felt so much more alert over the whole day even though I’d had less sleep, then you realise there are some advantages by having some sleep training. If you are really tired then you just shut off completely straight away and I think you can sleep very efficiently."

In terms of food, Sharp didn't go down the lightweight freeze dried option. "I took loads of food - I can’t get over how much food was put on my boat," he recalls, almost outraged. "My dad did a great job by getting all the food ready, but he put on far too much and we had a big argument before the race about it being too heavy. He was saying ‘well you’ll need it’ and as it turned out I ate quite a lot of it. I was always hungry but I actually find if you spend all your time eating all your food, you spend too much of your time doing that rather than sailing, which isn’t fast."

A majority of his food was tins and dry pasta and he would take his food for the day up to the cockpit and stuff it into a rope bag. He says a problem was that he had to cook the pasta and he was unable to cook for the first week because the sailing was demanding all his attention. "So I ate cold stuff like tins and Wayfarer camping food and quite a lot of flapkacks (they are good for energy) and then just drank water. I tried to keep my food not too dissimilar from what I’d eat normally. If you start piling freeze dried food into it and nothing else, your stomach doesn’t really take to it. The first five or six days, I had fresh food, properly luxury food, loads of hams, cheese and umpeen eggs. I had so many eggs on board. Then about five days into the race I found a whole container load of carrots. They mostly went over the side."

Of the 100 litres of water he took, he reckons he only got through about 40lt, considerably less than he anticipated.

While his boat was fitted with an NKE autopilot and a reverse tiller-mounted pilot, Sharp says he helmed a lot. "I helmed really whenever I wasn’t sleeping or eating or doing a bit of nav or weather or talking to my weather router. When I wasn’t doing that I was usually helming, but that was also because I didn’t have much diesel, or at least I thought I didn’t have. And it is definitely quicker, when the boat is going downwind and you are playing the waves, it pays dividend to sit at the helm."

He tends to sleep more at night because in the dark it is hard to steer as efficiently as the pilot, unless conditions demand otherwise. Saying this they were fortunate enough to have a reasonably bright moon for a majority of the race. Whenever he needed extra light he would turn on his steaming light.

Speed-wise Sharp says he hasn't managed to get more than 20 knots out of his boat. "They don’t go much faster than 20 knots as you start chucking loads of water out and there is a lot of drag. For their size the average speeds are very good because they are light boats and even in hardly any wind they slip along pretty well. In less than six knots of wind, I basically do the speed of the wind. Going downwind in up to 12-13 knots of wind you can do ¾ of the wind speed which is pretty good."



Class 40

The Route du Rhum has been the first major race for the Class 40s and while there were a number of different designs competing (read more about them here) because they are being sailed singlehanded and the performance of the skipper is such a vital ingredient in their performance, we still don't have much information about which are the fastest boats. Clearly with Pogos coming first and second, they are top design even though they were one of the first on to the water. "The Pogo is clearly a powerful reaching boat," says Sharp. "It is nice, really wide and has aggressive curvature on the sides and a flat bottom. So it has a powerful form, but it is also very good upwind and downwind. It is very good all round design. But a lot of it is down to how well you know your boat and it is difficult to say at this stage which is the best design."

While he reckons the Class 40 has a great future, with even more highly competitive sailing to be had, he plans to move on from the class into an Open 60 with his goal being the 2008-9 Vendee Globe. To do this he needs a major sponsor and in this respect winning the Route du Rhum will be a huge bonus, hopefully in much the same way as it was for Ellen MacArthur, who, aged just 22, won the Open 50 class with backing from her tentative new sponsor, Kingfisher. From this result Ellen was able to make the step up into a new Open 60 and the rest, as they say, is history.

Sharp doesn't have a title sponsor even tentatively on board at the moment and says he is going to spend the next few months working out how he can snare one. At present he hasn't signed with any management companies such as the Offshore Challenges Sailing Team, although he did received some direction prior to the Route du Rhum from Alex Thomson's organisation, who assisted in putting him in contact with sponsors.

As with so many British sailors attempting to get ahead in solo sailing, Sharp bemoans the lack of interest in the sport in the UK, despite the best efforts of Ellen MacArthur, Mike Golding and Dee Caffari in putting it on the map. "Singlehanded sailing is dead in the UK compared to France," maintains Sharp. "If I was French I would have no problem at all [getting a sponsor]. English companies don’t get the same sort of return because there isn’t the interest. It is astonishing the interest in solo sailing and publicity of the Route du Rhum in France where it dominates the whole of the sporting headlines for three weeks.compared to England, where it is pretty much negligible."

While his ultimate objective is the Vendee Globe, his first goal is to race an Open 60 in next year's Transat Jacques Vabre. He says he is not looking for a new boat as despite the plethora of new hardware expected on the start line of the next Vendee Globe Sharp still rates his chances in a secondhand boat. "My opinion is that you don’t need a new boat to win. The bigger boat you get the less likely you are to be on 100% of the polars. It is so hard to get to know a big boat like an Open 60 that well. It takes years and years, so the sooner you can get on a boat the better as a lot of it is about sailing time. Obviously if you get a 10 year old boat you will be seriously restricted, but now I think they are levelling off in terms of all round performance."

Phil Sharp's win in the Route du Rhum in our opinion is as significant an achievement as when Ellen MacArthur out of the blue won the 2000 OSTAR in her new Kingfisher. Being a bloke, he will find it harder to get sponsorship, but we hope there is some corporate entity out there smart enough to realise that in this 25 year old from Jersey they have a winner.